Posts Tagged ‘loopt’

In what are probably equal parts of influence between work, my kids, curiosity and boredom I have been spending time in the social game space lately primarily on the iPad, and I have to admit I am hugely underwhelmed.

For a bunch of reasons, Farmville never clicked with me on Facebook, I tried it–I was even one of the early players but I just never was able to “get into” the game. There are friends in my feed who are on the game more than 12 hours a day. In fact, it got so bad, I have actually hidden Farmville and its related links from my feed.

<Note to Facebook-it would be nice to be able to similarly hide that content and manage it from apps and mobile web.>

However, I completely understand the importance of “game mechanics” as a driver for engagement. Hell, for really no apparent reason I manage check-ins on Foursquare and Gowalla regularly and BrightKite and Loopt with less frequency and I really can not give you a good reason for it. There are aspects that are engaging.

1. The Work reasons: Taking those aspects and building them into the broader experience–the so-called real-time web is a driver. So, since this is my business I need to be in the space.

2. The Kids excuse: My kids are becoming voracious in social gaming–and since I need to be a good parent in 2010–and know what they are doing and provide guidance to safety and best practices, I am out there with them.

3. The Curiosity factor: I still wish I could figure out the compelling parts of Farmville or even the ones I do play like We Rule (I am esd714)

and City Story I am esd714).

4. Boredom is a driver: I have an hour-20 each way each day on the Long Island Rail Road. Tack on up to 10 minutes to at least half of those trips each week for random “only on the LIRR” issues, and I have time to kill.

Even with that, and the connections to Facebook and Twitter there just is not anything overly compelling that draws me into these games. The element of success in the game just does not carry enough excitement.

Of course, there are Second Life like experiences, and not really integrated into my daily web or consumption pattern–which probably helps make them less desirable to me. If there were a way to hook this into my daily reading on hockey, or baseball or politics it may work better.

But still, there has to be more, right? There is a bustling business model of selling for not a little money game components for these virtual world–north of $5B in 2010 so there should be a way to make this ring a little more indispensible, isn’t there?

So an interesting thing happened in the world of location-based apps–they moved from quirky curiosity of the early adopter to main stream almost over night. With the launch of Places, Facebook took a major step into the location awareness space and may have changed the playing field for the spunky upstarts in the game.

In this space, I have written about the upsides and downsides of some of the early apps in the location market like Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt and Brightkite. So the subject matter is not new to anyone who is even a semi-regular reader.

But what is new is a product that while now is only baseline (just check in–no gaming features) has scalable user base. No matter how you cut across the stats, while the upstarts are seeing hot growth the user base is still less than 5 million. Twitter founder Biz Stone announced recently on Twitter that his service has more than 105 million registered users. Facebook? How about 500 million users, half of whom log in each day.

150 million of those daily users access Facebook via mobile applications–and according to Facebook those users are twice as active as online only users.

Say only half that base uses Places, that’s still 75 million users a day–a number that Gowalla and FourSquare have proven will grow. It’s where the audience is.

Yes, Places is missing the concept of the mayor (FourSquare) or the items (Gowalla). But it has the reach of your full network. Again, based on Facebook numbers each user has an average of 130 friends.

While not a truly scientific case study, here are some interesting things I’ve noted using FourSquare, Gowalla and Places over the last few days:

Friday night I took my kids to a local chain restaurant. I checked in on all three services within 10 minutes. FourSquare had one other person listed in the place–neither of us was the mayor. Gowalla had my last check in (two months ago) as the most previous-and no new items. Places had 25 people checked in to the place when we got there.

Saturday we went to the mall to get some back to school stuff. FourSquare had seven people checked into the mall and 5-9 people checked into various stores we were in and out of. Gowalla had up to six concurrent users in any of the places-including the mall at any given time. Places had more than 50 in the mall, and one of the stores had 125 people checked into it.

Yesterday on a rainy Monday I took the girls to go see a movie at noon. I was the only check in to the theater on FourSquare and Gowalla. Places had 10 people checked in when we got there, and by the time we left another 15 people had checked in.

That’s scale.

As I have pointed out this does cause a problem–since I only follow and friend on location services people I know, while my Facebook (and Twitter for that matter) are littered with business contacts, people I just don’t know and people I really don’t want to share my location with–this will require some effort on my part to make Facebook Places work for me.

I suspect about the time Facebook introduces the gaming features and other elements that will make the service scale, I will be ready to tackle how to close of who knows where I am. In the meantime, while it’s not quite game over, it’s a dramatically new playing field for location services–there’s a new leader on the board.

Like this:

While Twitter and Facebook were grabbing all kinds of headlines for much of 2009 a bit of a phenomenon was developing as an off-shoot of both: location based social networking. Now, I have written about this a little in assorted contexts–I am talking about products like Foursquare, Gowalla and others like Loopt and CauseWorld. Each is slightly different-CauseWorld being the most distinct- but all have some basic core functionality.

Each of those listed (and a bunch of others I have not listed) leverage social networks and location–and give users a chance to do real time meetings. This location based social networking has become an early buzz for 2010–but the technology is nothing new and its kind of a natural extension of all those Twitter or Facebook updates.

Foursquare (NYC based) is kind of game where users check in and become mayors etc. It has a business opportunity to allow game players to get discounts etc at local stores and more. Over at Gowalla you don’t become the mayor of any place, but you accumulate and trade assorted items like avocados, coffee makers and slices of pizza (all virtually) that you can leave and trade at each location.

The others are somewhere in between–with the over-riding concept being that its more than sharing status; it’s about sharing location.

I was a little amazed a couple of weeks ago when I updated my FourSquare that I was at a Starbucks not far from my office. Low and behold, a friend was in the area and stopped in for an impromptu cup of coffee. It’s where my status (and at the time I was the mayor of the Starbucks, although I don’t think the barrister knew it based on the service provided) meets the real world.

So here’s to seeing many of you in 2010 now that I not only know what you are up to, but where.